ART: WORKS BY FONTANA, A STAGE-SETTER, ON VIEW

By ROBERTA SMITH

Published: December 5, 1986

THE Lucio Fontana exhibition takes up both the fourth- and the ninth-floor spaces of the Marisa del Re Gallery at 41 East 57th Street. On view through Dec. 24, this show is far from perfect, but it whets the appetite for a more extensive look at the artist and it is very timely. Fontana was one of several European and American artists who, during the 1950's, extended and subverted the ideas of Abstract Expressionism and Tachism in the direction of a greater reality, thereby helping to set the stage for the art of the second half of this century. Fontana's colleagues in this endeavor included Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Joseph Beuys and Yves Klein.

Fontana, who died in 1968, may not be as great as most of the aforementioned. Like Klein, he spent a great deal of time teetering between a flamboyant radicality and irredeemable tackiness. His bright idea for heightening painting's reality was to violate the picture plane with small nail holes, rough-edged gouges and, finally, crisp, clean razor cuts. But while he worked this rather simplistic signatory device for all it was worth, he also coaxed a rather amazing range of expression from within its limits.

This exhibition covers both the high and low points of his efforts. Among the latter are a couple of hot pink canvases - an egg-shaped tondo riddled with tiny rips and hilariously titled ''The End of God,'' as well as a square canvas with a single centered hole that gives the intermittent violence of Fontana's approach a definite misogynist tone.

The hard-edged Minimalist ''slash'' paintings for which Fontana is best known in this country look especially monotonous here. They are brittle distillations, from the end of his career, of an idea already too simple to begin with. Still, ''Spatial Concept, the Trinity,'' a big white triptych from 1966 in which fields of nail holes flank a spiral, connects to the more evocative Minimalism of Robert Ryman and Agnes Martin and is one of the best works on view.

Ultimately, Fontana's production divides into two groups: those paintings in which the cuts and slashes are the works' iconoclastic raison d'etre and those in which they are clearly just another kind of mark making -startling at first, but also visually convincing, and usually mixed in with various modes of paint application, sgraffito and occasional glued-on bits of colored stone.

In the small untitled canvas from 1953, Fontana used round and square nails of different sizes to create a little cosmos of stars as sweet and complete as any of Paul Klee's or Joan Miro's. In the 1957 ''Spatial Concept,'' a round yellow shape, in brushy pastel, is pinned to a brown background by a series of nail holes that continually flip back and forth before our eyes, reading first as punctures, then as little black dots of paint.

The same visual flipping operates in the much blunter yellow-on-yellow ''Spatial Concept'' of 1959. Here, a galaxy of little cuts reflects Fontana's irreverent destructiveness and his elegant draftsmanship in equal parts and we grasp most directly his ability to balance creation with desecration.

It is this duality - blatant, unapologetic and full of its own delights -that holds the attention. It enables Fontana's art to simultaneously move back in time toward pre-World War II European paintings and forward toward Arte Pover, Process and Performance Art, and it guarantees him his small but definite place in history. Also of interest this week: Francesco Clemente (Sperone Westwater, 142 Greene Street): Francesco Clemente works in many different media, but he's best when he unleashes his considerable painterly abilities and narrative instincts on relatively lightweight materials: pastel, fresco, drawing and now the monotype. Under the collective title ''Two Garlands,'' Clemente is exhibiting 88 monotypes made last spring and summer in New York. They are all the same size; they all feature the artist's self-portrait centered on the image's bottom edge; and they line the walls at Sperone Westwater like so many bonbons - relentless, irresistible, perhaps a little oversweet.

Exquisitely colored, with the ink drawn, wiped and brushed on via an array of techniques as impressive as they are nonchalant, they vary considerably in quality. Some are actually quite ordinary. But just when you think you can't look at another one, Clemente transcends the dreamlike indolence that often seems to be the central subject of his art, and delivers the goods.

Like Lucas Samaras, only perhaps more so, Clemente seems obsessed with his own image and with bringing an intense artifice - hotly decorative and sexually charged - to these images. He is the central, and by now familiar, persona drifting in and out of his art. Here, he portrays himself thinking or dreaming these various motifs, perhaps more directly than ever before.

Thus, from monotype to monotype, we see Clemente ''thinking'' about India, about the landscape, about poetry or sex, about finger painting or pure color. His head supports the world, or a pair of lovers who are attracting a swarm of bees as well as each other against a ground of wonderfully deep yellow. His face is surrounded by orange teardrops set in a field of orange-tainted chartreuse. It is the end of a long wipe of green ink that folds in upon itself like someone's intestines.